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Shakespeare on Screen 101 Samuel Crowl. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: Norton, 2008. 238 pp. $27.50 paperback.
In his previous book, Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (2003), Samuel Crowl established himself as one of the foremost authorities on the Shakespearean film renaissance of the 1990s. Whereas early critics had emphasized how film adaptations imported their style and method from theatre or avant-garde cinema, Crowl's study summed up a growing consensus among the second-wave of film scholars thatfin de siècle productions have unabashedly aped main-stream cinematic modes and techniques. It therefore seems a logical choice that Norton would ap- proach Crowl, a champion of accessible Shakespeare, to write an engaging primer for undergraduates. The fact that the publisher is packaging the book at a fifty percent discount with the Norton Shakespeare tells you everything you need to know about its target audience.
Books on Shakespeare and film, to be sure, hardly qualify as scarce commodities these days. Readers in search of heartier fare may still want to turn to Kenneth S. Rothwell's magisterial A History of Shakespeare on Screen, Courtney Lehmann's provocative Shakespeare Remains, the casebook compiled by Robert Shaughnessy, or Shakespeare the Movie and its sequel (with editorial direction by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose). While these texts offer more sustained and/or theoretically sophisticated analysis of individual films, Crowl synthesizes the best of this scholarship into a generous, wide-ranging, and, above all, approachable montage. Crowl's prose is pitched perfectly to the undergraduate ear: limpid, but not platitudinous, authoritative, yet never condescending. Perhaps the book's most attractive feature is a handy glossary of around seventy key terms in film-cum-literary studies. Thoughtfully, Crowl prints these terms in bold typeface whenever they appear in the body of the text, providing dozens of examples of how students might wield them in their own writing. For teachers who have found their casual references to dolly shots and whip pans met with stupefied gazes, Shakespeare and Film will seem an answer to a pedagogical prayer. Even the book's organization is elegant and witty. Crowl divides the text into two sections, the first a commanding overview of the history of Shakespeare and cinema, and the second a tutorial on the rudiments of film analysis. Each...